The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  I told you so

  Joe want walking down the street eating an apple. I saw him coming but I didn’t think anything of it. I saw him all the time.

  Hey, he said. Don’t I know you. I think we have the same hands, same legs, same eyes, same hair.

  Oh no, I said penching myself.

  The End

  Could this be how a Picasso or Rimbaud had first expressed himself—genius bursting forth like a colt, all long-legged and clumsy? Tracy never knew what to make of Noah. But what he did know was that this frisky imagination arrested him, excited him, made him dream. Excellent! he wrote. Your imagination is compelling and mysterious. But somehow that did not seem entirely right. The piece was a mess, all misspellings and sloppiness. But wouldn’t Rimbaud have been trashed by his cautious teachers? Wouldn’t Picasso have provoked worried frowns?

  Yes, go ahead, Tracy thought. Be crazy, be divine or daemonic, as the case might be. The thought was arousing—literally so—and as he registered his reaction he felt a squeamish sense of blasphemy, aware as he was how Noah sat in the next room and unsuspectingly read, or struggled through, his homework assignment.

  Of course, Noah was no Rimbaud or Picasso by any stretch of the imagination, and the depressing suspicion overtook Tracy: that a less interested mind than his would see in his favorite student’s feverish scribbling only the evidence of arrested emotional development of the type so easily diagnosable by a competent therapist, Dr. Maurer, for instance, the Forge’s resident shrink whom Noah despised so bitterly, and perhaps with good reason.

  I hope you’ve been seeing your writing tutor regularly, Tracy wrote. This piece is marred by numerous sloppy errors. He paused before the grade, considering A-plus for a desperate instant, then writing a perhaps too-generous B-minus. Putting away the finished stack of papers, he stretched and went to find his young genius.

  Noah was in the kitchen. Tracy stood unnoticed in the doorway and watched with curiosity how, sitting at the table, one leg pulled up under him, he picked through a pile of variously colored M&M’s he’d poured out on the tabletop. The finely sculpted head, half turned away from him, seemed truly classical in its features. What strange god had taken up habitation in this temple? What obeisance did he demand? Feeling suddenly a little too much like the devotee before a shrine, Tracy coughed once, gently, to signal his presence.

  Noah looked up. “I don’t like the brown ones,” he explained with no trace of surprise. Between the boy’s beauty and the dull words he spoke lay a nearly unbridgeable chasm.

  “Don’t they all taste the same?” Tracy asked, acutely conscious of the absurdity of love.

  “Yeah, they do. But I still don’t like the brown ones. They look like rabbit droppings.”

  Tracy had to laugh. Just let me kiss you, he thought. Let me kneel before you and fellate you in praise.

  “What?” Noah said in all seriousness.

  “You’re funny,” Tracy told him, though poking fun was the farthest thing from his mind.

  Noah only shrugged, continuing to sort through his candy, and Tracy found himself fighting back an attack of terrible emptiness. You poor kid, he thought plaintively. I could take you away from all this. In Tokyo last year, he had visited Yasukuni, the Shinto shrine dedicated to the teenage kamikaze pilots, a space so pure and austere it had made him ache with longing. Country at Peace, it was called. He wanted to sweep Noah up in his arms and transport him instantly to that sacred precinct. But why? Why, of all things, had he suddenly thought of that place dedicated to the futility of dead boys? They had lived brief lives of fire. They had not sorted through M&M’s. Perhaps that was it: he wanted Noah to breathe, just for a few precious moments, that otherworldly air. Then perhaps he’d see how stupid it all was, this life he led. How M&M’s weren’t worth discriminating about one way or the other, how he was caught inside a whole system of stupidities that were quietly pulling him under, though he couldn’t know it, only perhaps have an inkling from time to time, which was the part that was so sad, so terrible. Love was like death that way. He wanted Noah to have the capacity to be filled with awe. But the boy was entirely unaware. He concentrated on picking out the brown M&M’s and setting them aside.

  Tracy resisted mightily the urge to drape his arms around him, trail his lips lightly across the top of that close-cropped skull, whisper, “I want to save you”—meaning, perhaps, only “I want you to save me”—a plea he nonetheless did whisper, if only in the silence inside himself, where the sound of those words echoed hollowly, the way voices do in the great empty space of a cathedral.

  “So I read your story,” he told Noah as they sat down to their dinner of steamed kale with garlic, glazed carrots, and potato-and-onion pie. As usual, his guest at first ate cautiously, but then with more enthusiasm, though Tracy wondered if he’d be happier with a burger and fries. “I liked the writing in it,” he went on. “The whole thing was very hallucinatory. Haunting.”

  “I wasn’t very happy with the way it turned out,” Noah volunteered. “I had some ideas but, I don’t know, they didn’t really work.”

  It was endearing, really, to hear him speak seriously of his piece, the labor that had gone into it.

  “What do mean by work?” Tracy decided to probe. They were back on the legitimate footing of teacher and student.

  “Do you know the Brewer Twins?” Noah asked him casually.

  “The who?” Tracy hadn’t run across anyone by that name at the Forge.

  “These two brothers,” Noah explained. “I found them on the Internet. They’re models, I guess. I mean, they’re twins, of course. They look identical. You can’t tell them apart. There’s this one shoot where they’re just horsing around, wrestling with each other, that kind of stuff. So that gave me the idea. Like, if you had a brother who was totally identical to you, and everything you wanted to do, he wanted to do too, like a mirror. It’s weird, but sort of in a good way. They’re fun.”

  Tracy tried hard to follow. “So you’re saying your piece is about these Brewer Twins? Are they really named Joe and Jelly?”

  “No, I’m making all that up. I don’t know shit about them. I mean, I just saw their pictures on the Net is all. I got interested in them. Like I think too much.”

  “You saw a ghost in my house,” Tracy reminded him.

  Noah laughed appreciatively. “You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen.”

  “Well,” Tracy said, “try me sometime. Would you like some more pie?”

  “It’s good,” Noah told him. “I mean, for vegetarian. I never ate anything fresh growing up. Processed foods all the way. Fresh stuff still tastes odd to me. I miss the chemicals. But you should write a cookbook or something. You could make a mint.

  “But let’s talk more about my story. Do you have any suggestions how I can make it better? Do you think I can publish it somewhere?”

  Tracy was at a loss. Five-paragraph essays he could offer some pointers on, but how to touch something like Noah’s? How to tell him it was exactly what it was, an artifact dredged up from some profoundly deep well? As for publishable…

  “I think, you know, just keep writing stuff,” he said vaguely, aware that he was undoubtedly, at that moment, failing some important test. “The more practice you get, the better.”

  “You think so?” Noah said, a little skeptical, but not nearly as skeptical as he might have been, and Tracy wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that the boy hadn’t challenged his fraudulence.

  “Absolutely,” he said as if he believed it. “Practice makes perfect. Do you want to help me clean up here?”

  “Sure. But first let me step in the bathroom. Onions don’t always agree with me. They go right through, you know? Like—whoosh.”

  Tracy began to fill the sink with warm water and suds. He could easily have waited to do this little task till Noah went back to his dorm for the night, but he enjoyed the illusion of domesticity. They could never live together, of course, but for a few idle hours here
and there it was fun to pretend.

  And speaking of fun, who were these Brewer Twins? One of these days he was going to have to get Noah to show him what he knew about this Internet—the World Wide Web, which sounded as if a great spider held the planet in thrall. Already he was beginning to feel distressingly antiquated, and he was still far too young, he hoped, to be left behind. Nevertheless, it was a persistent worry: between himself and his students, already, a gulf yawned. Ask Noah what music he listened to, what books he read for pleasure—or, more to the point, what video games he played—and the answers would no doubt confound. And without a concerted effort it would only get worse. How did someone like Louis feel, living daily among boys he no longer had the smallest capacity to understand?

  Noah was taking a long time. The image blossomed involuntarily—the boy perched, pants around his ankles, on the toilet, a long ribbon of shit streaming from his anus. Immediately Tracy dispelled the psychic violation. And yet, he told himself, he was innocently interested in every conceivable thing about Noah, who had, after all, caught him off guard a couple of weeks ago with that phrase “creative as my asshole,” a moment as memorable, all things considered, as any in his nearly twenty-six years.

  Lost in his reverie, relying on habit’s autopilot to scour the dishes and place them in the drying rack, he was thus utterly unprepared for the sudden attack.

  “What the fuck?” he half shouted, his heart seizing up for a breathless instant, only to realize that Noah—whether in retribution for Tracy’s less-than-helpful comments about his story or perhaps just frisky after his shit—leaped onto his back and was clinging to him, arms wrapped around his neck and legs around his waist.

  “Gotcha,” he said, his hot breath on Tracy’s neck.

  “Hey. What’s this? No mugging the teacher.”

  “I’ll show you mugging,” Noah said. “This is how the Brewer Twins do it.”

  Tracy dipped one shoulder and Noah slid off him. But the boy wasn’t ready to quit. He planted himself in front of Tracy, feet spread apart, a strange grin on his face, ready once again to pounce. A classic stance, Tracy thought. He hadn’t suspected Noah was so aggressive, a trait undoubtedly inherited from his father, though perhaps channeled into less subtle forms than international commerce. He could call it off right now, whatever this antic little outburst was, but he didn’t. Instead he crouched in his own attack mode, which he’d learned from the dozens of television westerns he’d grown up on. They were both actors now, and they circled around each other all in fun, while Betsy, alerted by the commotion, stood in the door and watched curiously, unable to decide whether to flee or join in. Humans were such mysterious, unpredictable animals, after all.

  “Hah!” Noah feinted. He stamped his feet and Betsy barked once, loudly. “Get him, Bets,” he urged, but the dog just stood looking from him to Tracy and back, her breath ragged with anticipation, her dark eyes eager but confused.

  “Hey, no fair calling on reinforcements,” Tracy warned.

  “Who takes you for all those great walks? Who sneaks you dog biscuits?”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Tracy commanded, glancing Betsy’s way in the same instant Noah chose to spring. They clambered together briefly, arms locked, then Noah used his shin to catch Tracy behind the knee and they both came down in a tangled mass on the stunningly hard linoleum floor. Seeing her chance, Betsy leaped into the fray. “Every man for himself and Betsy against everybody!” Tracy shouted. They all three rolled around, grappling, grasping for purchase, both humans laughing and Betsy ecstatic. She danced among them, nipping lightly, pausing to stand off and bark now and again at the delicious spectacle of human animals finally become themselves.

  It took Tracy several moments to register that he was holding Noah’s body tight against his. Where the boy’s shirt had come untucked and ridden up, an expanse of smooth torso offered itself to his touch, and Tracy, careful to seem aggressive rather than caressing, slid his hands along silky, rib-rippled flesh. Delicately he cocked a knee between Noah’s legs—which gripped the invader tightly. Could he feel the rounded cap of a knee cradled against his balls? When Tracy had wrestled as a kid of fourteen, fifteen, the squirming, grappling contact was always charged, always sexual. But then he’d been a burgeoning little queer at fourteen or fifteen, already certain beyond his years. Other boys, presumably, wrestled for other reasons.

  Noah was wrestling to win.

  Giving up, getting it over with—he realized, sadly, he had to call a stop to this foolishness—Tracy rolled over onto his back and let Noah straddle his stomach triumphant, hands gripping his wrists, pinning him to the floor, blissfully unaware, Tracy hoped—or did not hope.

  “Now I’ve really gotcha,” Noah bragged. “You’re in real trouble now.”

  He was breathing heavily. His face loomed.

  “You know what we used to do in my old school when you lost a fight like this?”

  Tracy shook his head.

  “Close your eyes,” Noah ordered him. His tone was gloating, certain. “Go on,” he said. “Shut them. You have to do what I say.”

  With a sinking feeling Tracy knew—even as, helpless to resist, he closed his eyes—that he’d gone way too far, let them both go way too far.

  “Okay,” Noah said, transformed into a figure of commanding confidence, “now open your mouth.”

  “Don’t get weird on me,” Tracy admonished.

  “Don’t worry. Trust me,” Noah urged.

  Against all his better judgment—Here goes nothing, he thought to himself, here goes everything—he opened his mouth. In that first instant what he felt was the strangest, most unidentifiable sensation. Something wet and viscous had landed in the back of his throat. He jerked open his eyes to see Noah’s face hanging close above his and he realized: the boy had loosed a dollop of warm spittle into his mouth.

  “You spit in my mouth,” he accused furiously, hauling Noah off himself and sitting up.

  Noah seemed hurt, even perplexed. “I told you, it’s what we used to do on the playground.”

  Tracy made spitting sounds, though he did not, in fact, expel Noah’s spit from his mouth, instead going through the motions as a sense of shock and wonder spread through him. Fluid from Noah’s body was in his mouth, it was even now, as he swallowed, down his throat, inside his body. But what did it mean?

  The only safe, easily available response was outrage.

  “That’s way out of bounds,” he said sharply, aware at the same time how little that encompassed anything like his actual response. Nevertheless, the sentence did the work it had to do.

  Noah sounded offended himself. “Sorry,” he shot back. “I was just goofing on you. Don’t get so bent out of shape.”

  “What am I supposed to do? You don’t exactly go around spitting on people. What were you thinking?”

  And what kind of signals had he been sending?

  “I said sorry,” Noah repeated—as if he had, somehow, merely forgotten himself, reverted to some other time and place: kids on the playground, as he himself had said.

  Alone of the three, Betsy had no qualms about their game. She wagged her tail excitedly and barked for more.

  “Hush,” Tracy said impatiently. “Sit. Lie down. I said, lie down. Good dog.” Obedience school had been only a qualified success, but Noah also seemed chastened, ready to lie down on the kitchen floor as well.

  “Okay,” Tracy said firmly, the teacher, the adult, conciliatory but at the same time setting limits. “That got a little out of hand. Enough horsing around for one evening.” But beyond his soothing words, he was genuinely frightened. He wondered if his hard-on had shown. He was too afraid even to glance at the boy, afraid he’d see evidence there too of animal excitement. Or perhaps he wouldn’t, and he didn’t know which would be worse. He realized he shouldn’t have said “one evening.” Enough horsing around forever. “It’s getting late,” he went on briskly. “You should get on back to your dorm before curfew. And I’ve got stuff to do
. I’ve got to return some phone calls before it’s too late.”

  Maybe it looked worse—as in more suspicious—to push him away like this, but Tracy was too keyed up to think through the alternatives.

  “I’m sorry I got out of line,” Noah said. “I was just kidding around.”

  “No, no, that’s okay. It was an accident,” Tracy told him, hoping a lie might somehow make things better. Whatever else it might be, wasn’t spitting in somebody’s mouth vengeful, a gesture of contempt? “It was nothing. Forget about it. Now go on home. I’ll see you in class on Monday.”

  Taking his expulsion better than Tracy had feared he might, Noah obediently gathered up his books and stuffed them into his knapsack. The real power here, Tracy thought darkly but with some satisfaction, as he watched Noah docilely do his bidding, is still all mine.

  Or was it? Noah seemed, in his way, entirely unfazed. “Hey,” he said, pausing at the door to punch Tracy kiddingly on the arm. “It was real.”

  It certainly was real, Tracy thought, reeling from the impact not of that light punch but the other intoxicating collision of their bodies. It had exactly the kind of unreality that guaranteed just how real it had been. He was so stupid, though whether it was in letting something like this happen or not letting it continue was impossible to say. There was no way not to be stupid here, and stupidity, the instant Noah was safely out of the house, put him in a panic.

  What if it somehow got around? Who knew what kids might brag about, because that thought did occur to him, that what Noah had been after, in his show of domination, was some kind of bragging right. How he’d bested Mr. Parker. Mastered him. That would certainly be worth telling his friends in the dorm about.

  You never knew. In this situation, especially, as Tracy was discovering with each passing shiver of regret, you couldn’t know a damn thing.

  I’ve had my fair warning, he said to himself firmly. It’s over. In the future, he’d be strict. He’d curtail Noah’s visits, try to get them back on a more seemly footing.